1861: Civil War begins on the order to fire from a New Orleans general

The Civil War began with a Confederate battery opening up on federal forces holding the fort guarding the harbor in Charleston, S.C. Just 10 hours later, The Daily Picayune brought the news to New Orleans.

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After two days of pounding, the Union surrendered the fort to St. Bernard native Gen. Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, who led the attack.

The titanic struggle was referred to in the New Orleans newspaper as the War of Southern Independence, while the North called it the War for the Union. Later, the Picayune settled on War Between the States. Even now some Southerners decline to call it the Civil War.

While no Union troops and only one Confederate soldier died in the three-day artillery duel in Charleston, the next four years proved the deadliest in American history. By the time Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to American commander Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia in April 1865, more than 600,000 American soldiers had died. The South was ravaged, Lincoln was soon assassinated, and 4 million slaves were freed. America began the still-ongoing process of reconciling its history.

War hero Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard became a railroad executive and later the director of the then-notorious Louisiana Lottery. He is buried in Metairie Cemetery and sits astride his horse in a statue near City Park.